Life is Dream

“Yes: I am a dreamer.
For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

(Oscar Wilde)

Samantha Everton 

"Human being during his life time spends over 20 years sleeping and 4 years dreaming. This is if we mean by dream the REM phase (from the English acronym Rapid Eye Movement), which characterize one of the most lively phases of dream.

It means, we spend at least one third of our life sleeping. And most of the time we don't keep any memories of our dreams. Probably thanks to this massive removal, dream activity has been relegated for thousands of years to the realm of irrationality and animism.

The historical merit of having definitively attributed a psychological meaning to the dream should be ascribed to Freud and his studies.

Psychoanalytic studies tell us that the Id soul desires that in the dream they find their hallucinatory realization. But such desires, feelings and thoughts are distressing for the conscious self. Yet our sleep is not disturbed because the so-called censorship intervenes on them, which disguises, masks and processes the latent messages of the unconscious, transforming them into manifest images tolerable by consciousness (manifest content of the dream) in the rapid transition between sleep and awaken. It is for this simple reason that our dreams often seem so abstruse and incomprehensible to us.

The psychoanalytic definition of dream that the budding psychoanalyst has learned since the dawn of his training is therefore the following: 

'Dream is the disguised realization of an unconscious desire originated in childhood.'

In this definition there is the whole psychoanalysis: its epistemology, its clinical efficacy, its vision of the human being.”

So writes the psychoanalyst Dr. Qurino Zangrilli, about dream.

The approach of Jung, founder of analytical psychology, is quite different from that of Freud. For Jung dreams are the expression of a “collective unconscious”, patrimony of “archetypal” symbols and images (that is primordial and belonging to the species) that all men share. Their strength lies in their being bearers of a deep, illuminating knowledge, capable of transmitting wisdom and energy.

Then there are also hypnagogic hallucinations which are intense and vivid experiences that occur at the beginning of a sleep period and often occur in addition to hypnagogic paralysis.

This phase lasts from a few seconds to several minutes in which some or all of the senses--except in particular sight, hearing and touch--might involve, and it is often very difficult for the subject to distinguish the hallucination from reality. 

Sometimes hypnagogic hallucinations can be a rather frightening experience, especially since the illusion consists of terrifying subjects; the moment you live that experience the best approach is to reflect that everything that is manifesting is not real and calm your panic in the face of these illusions (visual, tactile and auditory) as they feed on the same fears of the sleeping subject, then disappear, giving way to a restful sleep.

This is what is known about the real dream, but anyone of us need the ability to dream without having to sleep. Pedro Calderón de la Barca also named his most famous theatrical drama of 1635 “La vida es sueño”, Life is Dream.

It is also true that this is often seen in a negative way, and is used as a warning: “Do not daydream!”

I have never believed in this mental setting that separates the dream from the waking, the rational from the irrational, in a rigid and limiting Cartesian dualism. 

Especially in art.

It's certainly interesting to relate the dream to photography, which is a conscious act, with its logic and grammar.

Let's not forget, however, as Freud taught us, that dreams also have a grammar, they are not rambling and meaningless clouds.

Before photography, painting had already tried to tell the power of dreams or to be a dream itself, from Füssli to Surrealism, as we have already seen in a previous article.

Even in music, all those who are passionate about electronic music are familiar with Tangerine Dream or that dreamlike masterpiece which is “Selected Ambient Works Vol. II” by Aphex Twin.

Johann Heinrich Füssli. “The Nightmare”, (1781)

I am interested in the photographic aspect, because – I repeat – it's an intriguing challenge to image one's inner visions. They become not only the mirror of the photographer's dream world, but also an open door for the subconscious of the observer.

Between us, honestly, I am an unstoppable dreamer, and perhaps more daydreaming than sleeping. I've always believed that this was the best part of me, and the one that makes me hyperactive in art.

When I look at images, they can be photographs or paintings, I always try to see them with one eye open and one closed, so to speak. I mean, I let my subconscious mind read them too.

Of course, not all images lend themselves to this game. Some are more didactic, others more mysterious.

In reality, the discussion is more complex. Many times, in these years, I have met people, friends, during the workshops or in everyday life, who had their inner switch turned off.

They had disconnected from the unconscious: what I call resignation to life.

For a thousand reasons, even very valid, they had pulled the oars in the boat and given up wandering the seas of the dream.

So let's go reread the role of the dream above. It is not simply a mental playground to indulge our fantasies. 

No.

Dream is a solver of inner dramas. It's what makes our unfulfilled desires come true in a hallucinatory way. This in sleep.

But in our daily lives, how many are our desires that slowly go out, until they are forgotten?

Yet sometimes it would take so little.

Feeding our dreams does not always involve a huge effort. If you love to write but you think that nobody cares, that it's wasting time, that you have to take care of the children, the house, the job, take only an hour of time for yourself, sit down and write regardless of who will read it: it is for you all the same. This also applies to drawing, photography, cooking or garden care.

Don't let your existences be just outward facing containers.

Masahisa Fukase

What I have learned in my life is this: if you are not the first person to believe in your dreams, nobody will ever do it for you.

I hope that these few photographs, of which I want to say absolutely nothing but the author, are a door that opens into your inner corridors in the shade.

You go through them. Never give up on the deep part of yourself. 

There lives the fire that feeds your hunger for life.

Life is Dream.

Michael Kenna

Nobuyoshi Araki

Michael Ackerman 

Karolin Klüppel

Todd Hido

Gueorgui Pinkassov

Stefano Romano

Suggested music: Aphex Twin “Selected Ambient Works Volume II” (Warp Records, 1994)

READ ALSO:

• The Dream
• The Shadow of Light

https://www.artistprofile.com.au/samantha-everton/ 

“Michael Kenna: Immagini del settimo giorno / Images of the Seventh Day” (SKIRA Photography, 2010)

“Araki” (Taschen, 2007)

Karolin Klüppel: “Kingdom of girls” (Hatje Cantz, 2016)

David Gibson: “Street Photography” (Il Castello, 2016)

Italian version